For May Day -- I give you Big Bill Haywood

Happy May Day, Comrades. Remember back when Red States had nothing do to with Republicans and May Day had nothing to do with trees and birds and saving the environment? Red meant RED, as in communist or socialist, and May Day was for Revolution.

Ninety years ago today, on May Day 1919, Socialists staged Red Flag marches in every major American city. It was American socialism was at its peak. Almost a million American workers went on strike against The Capitalist Enemy, led by radicals like William Z. Foster and Louis Fraina. Bolsheviks had just taken power in Russia, and Eugene Debs would soon win almost a million votes for President in 1920 running from a prison cell on the Socialist ticket. The Red Scare was at its peak, and Emma Goldman was still scaring the socks off complacent American bourgoisie.

And of all the prominent lefties, the emblemmatic leader was Big Bill Haywood, president of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) -- the biggest, baddest, toughest, roughest leftiest labor leader of them all.


Haywood wanted his IWW to be "One Big Union" for the entire American working class to battle the Corporate Plutocrats of J.P. Morgan's Gilded Age. IWW organizers often faced lynching or murder by company detectives. Strikers back them faced beatings, blacklists, and trumped-up prosecutions. But Haywood -- a former cowpoke and miner -- didn't shy away from pushing back, using sabotage or strong-arm tactics where needed. In 1905, the murder of Idaho governer Frank Steunenberg after a bitter strike set the stage for one of the great American courtroom dramas. Idaho prosecutors, backed by Pinkerton detectives, fingered Haywood for murder, and famed Chicago lawyer Clarance Darrow traveled to Idaho to fight the charges. He won Haywood an acquittal.


During the World War I, Federal agents under direction of President Woodrow Wilson launched a sweeping crackdown of the IWW. His Justice Department arrested over 100 IWWs and in 1918 tried them en masse for Espionage. Haywood, convicted and facing prison, fled to Bolshevik Russia for his final years.

So this May Day, forget the flowers and trees. Forget the Red States and Blue States. Let's all wear Red, sing The Internationale, shake our fists at the Power Structure, and toast Big Bill Haywood, a socialist's socialist, a radical's radical, a Red's Red -- as American as apple pie.


The best book on Bill Haywood is his own autobiogrpahy, pubished in 1929. Click here for the link to Amazon.com .

We're all socialists now? If so, then where is our Eugene Debs?

OK, Guerrilla Historians, let's be clear. Do we really live in a new age of Americn socialism?

If so, then here's my question: Where is our Eugene Debs?

Yes, after months of government bailouts of banks, investment firms, insurance giants, car companies, and all the rest, it sure looks a lot like public control of the means of production. But that kind of talk is European socialism. Don't forget, in America, we had our own home-grown brand, articulated by the likes of Big Bill Haywood (founder of the radical Industrial Workers of the World or IWW), Emma Goldman (who perferred being called Anarchist and was highly disillisioned by Lenin's Bolsheviks), and its clearest, most articulate voice of all, Eugene Debs.

Debs ran for president five times as a socialist, winning almost a million votes -- six percent of the total popular count -- both in 1912 and 1920 (even though in 1920 he ran from a Federal prison cell). Debs avoided esoteric theory. He defined his socialism in terms of justice, community, solidarity, and self-reliance, stemming from Jefferson and Lincoln as much as Marx or Engels. That's why he was so popular, not in universities, but in the American heartland and in working and immigrant neighborhoods.

To Debs, the evil of capitalism was no abstraction. Debs formed his peculiar view of socialism after leading the epic Pullman Palace Car strike of 1894, started as strictly non-violent and ultimately crushed by vigilantees, detectives, and Federal troops. Debs himself was jailed in the affair for violating an injunction, and that was where we first read Karl Marx. Debs would go to prison again, in 1918, convicted under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the draft and suppression of free speech during World War I.

This was the age of sweat shops and worse, long before basic health and safety rules, pensions, or worker rights. Resisters like Debs risked being blacklisted, jailed, or lynched. The rise of labor back then was the great civil rights / human rights struggle of the age.

Our society in 2009 has changed dramatically from Eugene Debs's America a century ago. But if we all now have to become socialists to get through the current economic collapse, then I at least want a leader like Debs, a socialist not ashamed of the name, willing to fight as an underdog, prepared to sacrifice personal freedom for principle, and able, through his speeches, to inspire his followers to march cheerfully to the barricades.

If you think I'm a fan, I can't deny the obvious. Here are two great recent books about Debs that might win you over too:

--Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent, by Ernest Freeberg and
-- Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, by Nick Salvatore.
-- Hear his voice on YouTube.